michaln wrote:I think I can see the problem with xHCI. It's actually macOS being either too clever or too dumb (take your pick).

The quick workaround is to reduce the VM's memory size. With 3GB, I have High Sierra beta 6 VM booting with xHCI (in fact booting off of a USB3 stick).

Gosh - that must be slower than something that's really slow.

Joking aside, I guess we have to wait for the VB developers to also emulate the behaviour that Apple now requires. Apple's forward path seems to be no more 32 bit apps so I guess all the hardware they have made that is capable of running High Sierra or later can also utilise this trick. I really doubt that they will patch their USB driver to allow it to run on VirtualBox.

For now, I'll just stick with the USB 2.0 emulation which seems to work OK with 8GB of ram assigned to the VM.

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16644#comment:22 wrote:It turns out that the macOS Sierra 10.12.4 (and later) installer won't boot on a system where the EFI firmware vendor is "EDK II", which includes VirtualBox. That behavior is specific to the Sierra 10.12.4+ installer and does not apply to an older Sierra install updated to 10.12.4 or later. Whether this behavior is intentional is something only Apple can answer.

High Sierra beta 6 (build 17A344b) does not exhibit this behavior, therefore no fix is currently planned on the VirtualBox side.

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16644#comment:23 wrote:The problem with USB is also specific to the Sierra (and High Sierra) installers, but it happens in 10.12.3 already. Basically the installer boots if the VM is configured with either xHCI or OHCI, but not with OHCI + EHCI. Again the installed OS behaves differently.

The only thing I can add is that when I installed 10.13b on an external HD, it updated the firmware on my 2011 17" MBP. And the next day it died. I kid you not...

If you obfuscate any information requested, I will obfuscate my response. These are virtual UUIDs, not real ones.Do NOT reply with the "QUOTE" button, please use the "POST REPLY", at the bottom of the form.

granada29 wrote:Gosh - that must be slower than something that's really slow.

The OS X installer does boot really slowly, but that's true with or without USB involved. And no, USB3 is not slow.

Joking aside, I guess we have to wait for the VB developers to also emulate the behaviour that Apple now requires. Apple's forward path seems to be no more 32 bit apps so I guess all the hardware they have made that is capable of running High Sierra or later can also utilise this trick. I really doubt that they will patch their USB driver to allow it to run on VirtualBox.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with application bitness. It's perfectly possible to run 64-bit applications on a system where xHCI does not offer 64-bit addressing. OHCI doesn't support 64-bit addressing in any form whatsoever. You tell me if you can run 64-bit apps with OHCI...